I disagree. Authoritarian governments just breed trouble, and will only increase the problems in the region.
The only way to teach people who have lived in an autocracy how to live in a free society is to let them do it themselves and make mistakes on the way
Yeah, like the governments I mentioned (Phillipines, Taiwan, Greece, S.Korea), and then there's El Salvador, Argentina, Chile, Spain, all authoritarian governments that we supported in the post-war era, making sure that they were not subverted by communists, while at the same time bringing them into the western world, and leading them to become successful free societies. In the post 9-11 world, we need to make sure that Muslim countries don't go into the Islamofascist orbit, and if a representative democracy so easily descends into islamism, as we can see in Iraq, in Turkey, Indonesia and Malaysia, we may need to work towards installing pro-American governments while at the same time building societies that are modern, that are well-off, and will be more likely to reject Islamic jihad.